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Greetings from Tromaville! Here is Chapter 17 from my book, Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER. In this chapter, we take a look at the importance of always carrying… not weapon, but rather, marketing materials – SCHWAG! What do you think?

Chapter 17: Always Salute the Schwag!

“I pledge allegiance to the schwag…of the United States of Tromaville.” As part of the Troma Team, I quickly learned the power of “schwag” and the importance of always “carrying.” In this instance carrying did not mean a concealed weapon, although one could argue that good schwag is an excellent sales and marketing weapon. In Tromaville carrying meant you were always equipped with a supply of stuff—stickers, flyers, T-shirts—schwag. Your briefcase was full of the stuff. If you owned a car, your trunk was full of the stuff. If you carried a purse or murse*, your purse or murse was full of the stuff. While representing the Troma Team, you never walked into a meeting empty-handed. You always had your schwag at the ready. Schwag sells.

There’s a reason printed paper flyers were called “sell sheets” in the movie business. They were also called “slicks,” perhaps because the slicker they were, the better they sold. For every movie in the Troma library, having a great key art image that became the basis of the poster, and then the smaller sell sheets was essential. As essential as having a good trailer. Arguably far more essential than having a good movie. Back in the day, especially in the realm of international film distribution, the sale (technically, the licensing) of a film for distribution to a small foreign market was often concluded based on the sell sheet and trailer alone, many times long before the film in question had actually been completed (or in some cases, even started). We were selling the dream. Selling the outcome. And schwag helped.

Like trusty Boy and Girl Scouts, always carrying schwag meant you were always prepared. You never knew when you’d have the opportunity to leave behind that flyer for Curse of the Cannibal Confederates or that gorgeous green “I love Toxie” sticker. And then there were the T-shirts. Especially the T-shirts. We would print bright-red (and sometimes yellow) “I made the Troma Team” T-shirts by the hundreds. They were inexpensive thin cotton tees with a big Troma logo on them, and people loved them. When it came to production time, our “I-Made-the-Troma-Team” tees were like a liquid currency. They were our beads, our wampum, our bitcoin, and often our savior. It is amazing what regular unassuming humans will do or give up in exchange for a free T-shirt.

When scouting for locations, popping open the car trunk and tossing a couple of T-shirts to the owner of the property you are begging to trample and defame was often the tipping point that sealed the deal. When casting dozens of background actors (we never had extras…always “background actors”) to fill a scene, hordes of fans would stand for long grueling days, all for a stale bagel at seven in the morning and a Troma T-shirt when they left at the end of the day, often past midnight.

When making a movie, especially a low-budget independent movie, there are 1,000 things that can go wrong at any moment. Giving someone a free T-shirt can solve 937 of them.

As proof that the Troma Team always carries (schwag) wherever they go, I will share a story that Hertz. Not Herz as in Michael Herz, Lloyd’s partner in cinematic crime and Troma co-founder, but rather Hertz as in the car rental company that doesn’t quite try as hard as Avis. Many years after I emigrated from Tromaville, I was in Los Angeles on business, and I rented a car there. At one point while navigating my way through the torturous traffic that is synonymous with driving in LA, I stopped short at a light, my unpracticed foot a bit heavy on the brakes of the unfamiliar vehicle. As I screeched to a sudden stop, a sudden mess of papers and folders slid out from under the driver’s seat. I looked down, and lo and behold, my feet were surrounded by Troma schwag—flyers, stickers, press kits, and the like. It was literally a blast from the past.

I laughed, and at the first opportunity, I called Lloyd asking him if he had recently been in LA. “I just got back last night,” he replied. “How did you know?”

“Did you rent a car there?” I queried.

“Of course, I did; it’s LA,” said Lloyd. (This was years ago, before the invasion of Uber).

“Well, I think I rented the same car you were driving. You left your schwag under the front seat!”

Yep. He did. Schwag rules.

*A “murse” is a man-purse, carried by a man, just as a “manzier” is a brazier worn by a man. Watch Seinfeld reruns for more details.

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That’s Chapter 17 – Do you always have a pocket full of Schwag for your company? Why not??? Stay tuned for “Chapter 18: “Playing by the Rules!” which explains the “rules of production” that every Troma movie lived by, and which serve as an example for common guidelines you could be using for your business, to help keep everyone on the same page.

Greetings from Tromaville! Here is Chapter 16 from my book, Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER. In this chapter, we take a look at Troma’s take on “content marketing.” What do you think?

As stunts go, we did some amazing ones at Troma, and the best of them, like the dramatic (and now infamous) “car flip” have been used and reused in countless Troma movies. Shot one quiet afternoon on the back streets of Hoboken, New Jersey, while costly and complicated to shoot, the “car flip” has perhaps become the most cost-effective bit of film ever shot by the Troma Team (when amortized across the vast number of subsequent films the same sequence has appeared in). Why not? It’s a great stunt, even the seventeenth time you see it. Like a fine wine, it gets fermented—er, I mean better—with age. Like the pestering of a wild and crazy two-year-old toddler, with repetition, it becomes less annoying and cuter. Like a pimple that, after it won’t go away for nine months, reinvents itself as a beauty mark. You get the idea.

Of course, in the case of Troma, given the cult and culture of the rabid fan base, repurposing a stunt or scene across multiple movies turns into a welcome wink to the knowing film fan who can spot the repeated spot. So not only does the cloned scene save time and money, it becomes an Easter egg that delights eagle-eyed fans who are paying close attention—a double whammy win for the Troma Team.

What content can you wisely repurpose for your purposes? Do you have anything that can double as an Easter egg to charm your customers?

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That’s Chapter 16 – Short and to the point. Stay tuned for “Chapter 17: “Always Salute the Schwag!” which explores how important it is to always have some marketing material to leave behind… wherever you are!

Greetings from Tromaville! Here is Chapter 13 from my book, Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER. In this chapter, I talk about the “c” word – culture, and how Troma taught me what’s really important to pull a team together (hint: it’s not pizza and beer on Fridays). What do you think?

“I don’t make crappy movies. I spend two or three years making a film. I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my movies very seriously.”

—LLOYD KAUFMAN, TROMAVILLE

Willie and Lloyd are both sort of saying the same thing here. Know who you are and embrace it. Self-awareness is as important for a company as it is for each of us as an individual. There is so much talk in the business world today about culture. There are countless books, countless consultants, and countless dollars spent on “culture building” within corporations.

Often these efforts miss the core of what culture really is, what culture really means. Contrary to popular belief, culture is not about pizza and beer on Fridays, or unlimited free snacks in the company dining room (though on a film set of any size or budget, heaven help you if you don’t have a functional craft-services department. The fastest way to throw any film production off course is to fail to feed the crew, and feed them well and often). At its core, culture has more to do with your brand than your office decor.

A great company culture enables and encourages employees to embody and reflect the essence of the brand in their ethic, attitude, and execution of their work. It goes deeper than office environment and is more significant than a list of core values on a whiteboard. A great company culture is one where everyone organically lives and breathes the same brand. A great culture is one where all employees understand and appreciate the DNA of the brand. They don’t have to be it, but they have to believe it.

A great company culture is not a cult (though some of the highly publicized “great-culture” enterprises seem to have lost that distinction) because in a cult the disciples are most often following blindly while in a great company culture the employees are following with purpose. A great culture is created by a shared purpose that will move the company forward toward success.

Defining and communicating that purpose is core to a company’s success. On a film set, the purpose is most often very clear. We are making a movie. The roadmap is the script, literally. The strategy is the production schedule. If the director is a good CEO, then everyone on set knows their role and expected contribution toward the execution of the plan and the fulfillment of the purpose.

In business, the purpose and strategy also need to be clearly defined, and as important, the role each employee plays has to be understood by the employee(s) and management. There needs to be a screenplay and a production schedule for your business.

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That’s Chapter 13 – Another valuable lesson I learned making Troma movies: Having a clearly defined purpose and strategy is the best way to create a great company culture! Stay tuned for “Chapter 14: “Strategic Partners: Burn Houses, Not Bridges,” which explores some “hot” lessons about business development learned from location scouting for Troma films.

Greetings from Tromaville! Here is Chapter 9 from my book, Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER. This chapter still resonates strongly with me to this day. It’s all about the importance of consistency when building a brand. What do you think?

The most valuable trait to understand and recognize in someone or something is consistency. We, humans, are hardwired for pattern recognition. We are built to spot things that are consistent, for a pattern is simply something that appears or occurs consistently. We can deal with patterns. We can deal with consistency. When I first arrived in Tromaville, I quickly learned that Lloyd and Michael were yellers and screamers. Especially during film production.

Author’s note: We realize that the previous chapter espoused the importance of using “we” instead of “I,” and yet here we are using “I” throughout this book. We are distraught over this blatant contradiction and recognize that we may lose some credibility and perhaps even some of your trust. We feel truly awful about this and hope we have not let you down. However, in the context of a somewhat autobiographical tale (after all, the subtitle of this Tromatic tome is “one man’s journey to Hell’s Kitchen and back”), the author felt we could take creative license—and risk it being revoked—and share the stories and lessons herein from the author’s unique, first-person perspective. We hope you will forgive us. And now we return you to chapter 9, already in progress.

When the pressure was on, the yelling and screaming was also on. And on at a very loud volume. Before joining the Troma Team, I don’t think I really understood what it meant to be yelled at. Sure, as a child I had done stupid stuff to the point of provoking one or both of my parents to raise their voice at me. But never in business had I been the object of such verbal aggression. At first, it was shocking and upsetting to me, and since it was such a foreign experience, I took it personally and assumed that I was being yelled at for something I had done.

But soon the patterns revealed themselves, and as a genetically sound human, I came to recognize that the yelling had absolutely nothing to do with me. It was simply the way the mad moguls operated. They were screamers. They were yellers. And they screamed and yelled consistently, at anyone and everyone. They screamed and yelled at each other. Hell, they set up an office environment where they faced each other all day, probably (consciously or not) to facilitate easy yelling.

And once my pattern recognition light bulb went off, the yelling no longer bothered me. Consistency is easy to deal with because your expectations are set and accurate. If someone always yells, you always know what to expect. If someone is consistently an asshole, you know what to expect. You understand their pattern and can deal with them accordingly and with less stress. It is the inconsistent people who challenge us. The person who rarely yells and then suddenly, unexpectedly screams, will truly throw us off. The person modeled on Jekyll and Hyde, who is sometimes your best friend and sometimes a maniacal asshat, and you never know which to expect, that is the most difficult person to deal with. They are unpredictable. They don’t fit a pattern.

So, the yellers were easy.

And to their credit, by the time I left Tromaville they had calmed down quite a bit, and the old yelling, with true vim and vigor, was seldom experienced.

So, what does all this talk of yelling have to do with branding? Consistency. It is all about consistency. An effective brand must always stand for the same thing. An effective brand must be consistent. What your brand is consistent about perhaps matters far less than the fact that you are consistent in presenting the brand values. Know your brand. Decide what it stands for, good or bad, and get behind it consistently. The more consistent your brand message is, the more lasting it will be. Look at the great brands. If you ask ten people what those brands stand for, you will get ten very similar answers. They all have the same expectations of the brand.

At Troma, the brand image was one that resonated deeply with our fans. We were a team, The Troma Team, and if you were a fan, you were a part of that team. You were welcome in Tromaville. We took our business seriously, but we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. If they had not already been violently ripped from our throats, our collective Troma tongues were held firmly in cheek.

Understanding and appreciating the Troma brand was critical to my success in Tromaville.

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That’s Chapter 9 – Another one of my favorite lessons in the book: the power of Consistency, learned from a couple of real screamers! Stay tuned for “Chapter 10: Find Something to Believe In” in which I reveal my true feelings about the films I had a hand in making during my tenure in Tromaville…

Greetings from Tromaville! That was how every single bit of correspondence began—from the letters we’d type on typewriters and word processors in the early days, to the telexes, faxes, and eventually e-mails we would send. The lessons I learned about building a brand and brand consistency while a member of the Troma Team have stuck with me for more than twenty years. What was this offbeat, off-kilter, often tasteless runt of a movie studio doing that was so compelling from the standpoint of branding? First of all, they were building a brand, something in those days arguably no film company except Disney had done.

Nobody went to see a movie because it was a “Paramount Picture” or because it was from “Warner Brothers.” They went to see a movie because it starred Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep, or because it was based on a favorite book, or was directed by Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola or another star director. The studio was secondary and largely meaningless to the moviegoer. Except for Disney. People, especially families, went to see a movie because it was a Disney movie. And Troma. Our fans would go see (and still go see) a movie because it was a Troma movie. Whether it is Redneck Zombies or Tromeo and Juliet or some other odd title they never heard of; as long as it was Troma, our fans would show up. Why? Because, like Disney, based on the brand, they knew what to expect. That’s what branding is all about—establishing trusted consumer expectations. It doesn’t matter if the expectations are for family-friendly fare or tasteless, sophomoric gore, as long as the brand message is well established and consistent, it works.

And a strong brand has to be rooted in something accessible. Something consumers can relate to either by association or by aspiration. Something that makes them feel that by supporting the brand, they are part of a community or tribe of like-minded consumers and fans. This is as true for toothpaste as it is for a cookie or, in this book’s case, a low-budget, independent movie studio.

Troma has achieved remarkable brand affinity over forty years and around the globe by creating an inclusive universe—Tromaville, where everyone is part of the “Troma Team.” This concept is hammered into every Troma employee and everyone who watches a Troma movie. From the opening logo to every Troma film, the message is clear. This is “a Troma Team release.” There is no “i” in Team, and there is definitely no “I” in Tromaville. Well, I suppose there actually is the letter “i” in the word “Tromaville,” but aside from that grammatical digression, once you enter the land of Tromaville, you must always put the Troma Team first, literally and figuratively.

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That’s Chapter 7 – Another short and sweet one (are you seeing a pattern here? This book is an easy, enjoyable read!) Stay tuned for “Chapter 8: The Power of We” where we learn a valuable lesson from a simple rule we lived by at Troma, and something you might consider trying.

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> About the Author

While early in his career, Jeff Sass was making B-movies, he has spent more recent years in the C-suite as a COO, CEO, and CMO. With a career spanning the entertainment, computer-game, mobile, and Internet worlds, he has written and produced for film and TV, and he has been a tech start-up entrepreneur.

A frequent speaker on entrepreneurship, mobile marketing, domain names, and social media, Jeff Sass has had articles appear in Forbes, Entrepreneur, AdAge, and many other publications. As the father of three, he has also been a prolific “dad blogger,” participating in influencer campaigns for brands including Intel, Sony, Ford, LG, Asus, and others.

Despite this seemingly successful career, Jeff Sass is happy to admit that everything he knows about business and marketing, he learned from The Toxic Avenger. For a more detailed Touch of Sass, please visit JeffreySass.com

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Reviews:

“Great book about marketing and how your career can evolve from past experiences. Easy to read.” – Amazon Customer

“It’s funny, it’s irreverent, and an incredibly valuable Primer, AND Reminder, for how to succeed in business. Thank you Jeff Sass… any interaction with you is valuable, in so many ways.” – Ted Rubin

“The author packs a lot of great marketing advice and examples in a little over 100-pages — and who doesn’t like the Toxic Avenger? I learned some stuff; confirmed some other things and thoroughly enjoyed the read. Jeff Sass can write and told a great story of his years with the cult classic movie studio Troma while weaving in dozens of important marketing and business lessons along the way.” – B. Olson

“I’ve read a lot of business and marketing books that include banal examples from Corporate America. This book is very different; it brings life to business lessons such as the importance of teams through colorful stories from the author’s personal experience at B-movie studio Troma. Several of the business lessons are ones I haven’t heard anywhere else and make a lot of sense. I highly recommend picking up this book.” – Andrew

“This is a fun book to read with great lessons for all entrepreneurs. Jeff Sass weaves his personal story working on the Toxic Avenger series and other movies into practical and wise lessons for any business owner and marketer. If you like movies, super heroes or have ever wondered what the real business of the independent film industry is like, you’ll enjoy this book and have great takeaway points about how to build and promote your products and services.” – Jennifer Wolfe